What Do Chinese Leaders Really Think About the Nobel Prize?

The Nobel Prize is an object of obsession in China, and a consistently maddening one. “How far are we from a Nobel Prize?” was the title of a science program on Chinese state television some years ago, and similar discussions pop up in the paper all the time. Driven by both insecurity and pride, the government and academia have pursued Nobel prizes for scientists and writers with such intensity that all the analysis and prognostication begin to look like elements of a state campaign—which, in fact, they are. “The task of securing a Nobel Literature Prize—viewed as a passport to world recognition as a modern civilization—generated conferences, a national literature prize, delegations to Sweden and countless articles,” Julia Lovell, the British sinologist, writes in “The Politics of Cultural Capital,” her 2006 book dissecting China’s quest for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

During the nineteen-eighties, Nobel prizes of any kind were elevated in the Chinese official mindset into emblems of prestige akin to hosting the Olympic Games, or qualifying for the World Cup, or getting into the World Trade Organization. The quest for prizes was so intense that Chinese commentators began to talk about the country’s “Nobel complex,” framing the hunt for prizes as a matter of national emotional health. “The Nobel Literature Prize had become a cause of a psychological disorder, a token whose value and authority as imagined in China was inflated out of all proportions to its real importance or exchange value in international letters,” Lovell writes.

But when China actually won the prize for literature, it was not at all what it had hoped: the prize went to Gao Xingjian, a Chinese-born exile writer, who was living in France. His writings were sharply critical of China, and the government in Beijing responded by denouncing the “political purposes” of the Nobel Prize and declaring that the prize had lost its legitimacy. (Gao was eventually listed as a “French” writer.)

The Chinese government faced a similar problem when the Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1989. Though the government classified him as a citizen, he had been living in exile since 1959, much that time in explicit opposition to the Beijing regime. When the Tibetan leader won the prize, China’s officialdom needed to explain to itself how this happened. A fascinating internal report from that period, produced by a state-backed research group, discounts the significance of the prize (after China had spent years trying to win it). The report, published in “Internal Analysis,” a publication of the Tibet Autonomous Region Academy of Social Sciences, helps us imagine the kind of internal conversations that are going in the halls of power after the imprisoned writer Liu Xiaobo won the Peace Prize today:

The Peace Prize has always been very controversial and has always been an instrument of political struggle and has very often been an object of severe criticism and rebuke. For example, in 1938 Neville Chamberlain received it.*… The award has included people like Havel**, Sakharov and Lech Walesa. So, very often this prestigious prize has gone to terrorists or politicians who serve the interests of capital. It’s like a prostitute claiming to be a virgin.

Knowing how much China cares about the prize adds another dimension of pique to its public response: a few hours after the Nobel Peace Prize went to Liu Xiaobo, China’s Foreign Minister responded, as expected: “Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law.” Giving him the prize “runs completely counter to the principle of the prize and is also a blasphemy to the peace prize,” according to a statement. CNN was blacked out when it tried to report Liu’s win. Some Chinese users on Twitter flooded the Web with congratulations, though Twitter is banned in China, so the messages were out of sight to most Chinese readers. For days, the Chinese Web site Sina had been running a special page dedicated to chronicling the news of the 2010 Nobel prizes. On Friday afternoon, after Liu received the Peace Prize, the Sina page was nowhere to be found.